{"id":185788,"date":"2025-12-15T13:12:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/185788\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T13:12:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:12:06","slug":"how-the-biggest-monopoly-in-ai-is-keeping-its-throne-in-2026-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/185788\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Biggest Monopoly in AI Is Keeping Its Throne in 2026 and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a new Bloomberg profile<\/a> of the Dutch lithography giant ASML points out, the global economy is counting on one monopoly\u2019s ability to shoot lasers at tin droplets again, but do it even better this time. <\/p>\n

To be clear, the legal theory on monopolies doesn\u2019t say everyone who corners a market is a villain. If a firm simply makes a far superior product, and runs the table economically on that basis alone, antitrust law isn\u2019t supposed to kick in and break that company up for doing a good job. As previously noted<\/a> by Gizmodo, ASML does a magic trick that, so far, no one else can.<\/p>\n

But monopolies in AI are unsettlingly ubiquitous. Nvidia famously dominates the market for data center GPUs, and it\u2019s been investigated by U.S. antitrust cops<\/a>. Only 10%<\/a> of the AI GPU market belongs to other companies.<\/p>\n

ASML\u2019s monopoly makes Nvidia\u2019s look almost quaint. Bloomberg frames ASML as the bottleneck that AI flows through, because it is. If you want to make the most advanced AI chips, you need ASML\u2019s lithography machines, and you can literally accept no substitutes because there are none. Bloomberg describes ASML\u2019s chokehold on premium lithography in blunt terms: its market share is \u201ca cool 100%,\u201d and ASML is \u201cstill the only company\u201d capable of making the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems high-end chips require. <\/p>\n

I can\u2019t fully explain how ASML\u2019s absurd technology exists, because I\u2019m not an engineer, but if you\u2019ve heard of it, it\u2019s because you\u2019ve seen news coverage of the company\u2019s enormous $400 million machines<\/a>, shipped from the source in tact on dedicated<\/a> plane flights. And maybe you\u2019ve heard that these machines work by shooting lasers at airborne, microscopic droplets of molten tin<\/a>, turning them into a plasma that generates EUV light brighter than the sun, and then use advanced optics to focus that light in order to print the intricate patterns onto the GPUs used to train and run AI systems. <\/p>\n

So for the most part, Nvidia designs them, and TSMC manufactures them with ASML\u2019s machines<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s tension in Bloomberg\u2019s profile, because CEO Christophe Fouquet\u2019s \u201cnext big test\u201d as Bloomberg writes, is coming up: ASML is transitioning from the EUV process already in place to \u201chigh numerical aperture\u201d (High NA) aimed at reaching new levels of intricacy\u2014printing at sub-2-nanometer process nodes. As always, smaller means higher performance at lower heat levels and with less power required. <\/p>\n

But it\u2019s unnerving how much economic \u201cheat\u201d and \u201cpower\u201d is focused on this one dazzlingly bright potential point of failure. <\/p>\n

In some ways, ASML\u2019s products are the global economy right now. A recent New York Times report<\/a> describes a \u201ctwo-track economy\u201d where \u201ceverything tied to artificial intelligence is booming\u201d while everything else is stagnant, declining, or at least not exactly vibrant. AI\u2014or more specifically, investors dumping money into AI\u2014is almost the only thing making companies do things like build and hire people. <\/p>\n

So ASML and Fouquet\u2019s \u201cHigh NA\u201d transition is just a company moving onto a new product cycle, sure, but in some sense, ASML feels like the last remaining lug nut holding a loose wheel onto a truck that\u2019s going freeway speeds. And the truck has everyone on Earth\u2019s economic security inside it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a new Bloomberg profile of the Dutch lithography giant ASML points out, the global economy is counting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,3186,85,46,76981,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-185788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-asml","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-lithography","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}